Datacenters in Iceland

The latest BusinessWeek magazine had an article that talked about the cost of powering and cooling datacenters. Several companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft have been discussing having data centers in Iceland. According to the article, “the cost of power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, to $4.5 billion, and could double again by 2011, according to the U.S. government.” Having a data center in Iceland could cut a lot of the cooling costs down by pulling in the cool air from outside to cool the servers. It makes a lot more sense to have a data center in a cold place and the idea of using outside air and air from ice has been used for existing data centers in other places.  I assume there are a lot of other factors that are preventing a growth of datacenters from popping up in places where it is really cold, such as getting the power, internet cable fibres, and the resources. With the growing costs of power, I am sure that the huge amount of vacant land, cheap geothermal energy, and cold temperatures will draw some interests. Verne Holdings announced plans for a $306 million data center near Keflavik International Airport. It will be the first data center in Iceland set to open in 2009. Hopefully we will see more companies build out their data centers in cold areas to take advantage of the natural cold air.

Add comment March 24th, 2008 Alex

Company Holiday Shutdown saves energy

I wanted to share how a company shutdown can save a company energy. At Yahoo!, during the holiday week last year, there was a holiday shutdown where employees were encouraged to either take the week off or work from home. The offices operated minimally for those who did go into the office. Yahoo! also gave away 2,000 CFLs in the lobbies of the Sunnyvale and Mission College campuses. The shutdown resulted in a 107,000 kilowatt hours decrease of energy consumption which equates to a savings of 73,000 pounds of CO2 and also equates to $12,000 in estimated savings.

Add comment January 28th, 2008 Alex

Yahoo! builds new Data Center the green way

A new 14,000 sq. ft Yahoo! data center was open in Quincy, Washington and had a welcome ribbon cutting by David Filo as well as Wylie Gustafson, the original guy who yodels “Yahoo!” at the end of commercials. Quincy, Washington was chosen as the prime location due to its fiber connectivity, network availability, affordable power, land and operations, and welcoming community. The best part about this data center was that it was custom built as opposed to all the other data centers that are usually rented. This allowed Yahoo! to put energy efficiency as a top priority in the design and construction of the data center. One advantange of being in Washington was the ability to draw in the cold air outside to cool the servers without using air conditioning. Carbon-free electricity using hydro and wind power the facility and all the lights operate on motion sensors. This is a great step in Yahoo!’s step in reducing energy consumption and becoming carbon neutral by the end of this year.

Read more at Columbia Basin Herald Online

1 comment December 13th, 2007 Alex

Clean Tech Investments

I don’t usually refer to articles on Techcrunch, since it is a tech/web 2.0 blog, but this was a good reference that was green related.  In the chart above, you can see that Clean tech investments have gone up significantly. It was no surprise, but at least we have evidence from the National Venture Capital Association(NVCA) and Thomson to back it up. In the first three quarters of 2007, clean tech investments make up 10 percent of all funding with 168 deals at $2.6 billion, while internet investments has 15 percent.  Out of the 168 deals, 149 are in the US with California accounting for 68 of them while Massachusetts was second with 11 deals. Solar energy was the biggest sub-sector with 35 deals while alternative energy had 33 and power supplies industries had 25 deals. We have not seen too much hype and attention to too many new clean tech startups and companies but it will interesting to see what will come out of this. I don’t see it as a bubble since it has just started but it will be exciting to see what happens in the next few years. If we do not see any results from all this clean tech boom, then investors would probably stop investing in them, so come on clean tech companies, let’s see some results!

via Techcrunch and NVCA

Add comment November 29th, 2007 Alex

Google getting greener

Google announced that they will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in developing renewable energy as part of a plan to clean up the environment. The project, “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal,” has the goal of looking for a green energy alternative to coal. This is going to help Google’s image as they continue to become a greener company. Google also hopes to license any technology that comes out of this project and it will be probably be another source of revenue for the company. The company is hiring engineers and looking for investment financing for solar technologies. Google is currently one of the biggest energy customers in the Silicon Valley and it hopes to run its data centers one day with the new technology. With all the money that Google is making, it is good to see that the company continues to do things that will benefit everyone. At the rate this company is growing, they could very well take the lead in coming out with some breakthrough green technology.

via Reuters

Add comment November 27th, 2007 Alex